


Guts of a Star

by ifeelbetter



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Backstory, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-12
Updated: 2013-02-12
Packaged: 2017-11-29 01:04:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/680927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifeelbetter/pseuds/ifeelbetter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint Barton should have gone down in the Top Secret case files as the agent who finally took the Black Widow down. Instead, some pencil-pusher from accounts left a post-it note on the inside of his quiver with a different plan.</p>
<p>This is the story of two spies and an accountant. And, no, it's not the beginning of a knock-knock joke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guts of a Star

If you asked, Clint wouldn’t have given you a straight answer. It was in his nature to slide away from direct questions at an angle, but it didn’t come naturally to lie outright. It made him unusually suited to a career he hadn’t wanted and completely wrong for the things he would have chosen. The best liars are spies, after all, and the best spies are the people who are predisposed to corkscrew answers.

But if there were some circumstance in which Clint _could_ have given a clear, direct answer—he would have told you he wasn’t a spy. He would have told you that he was a soldier who went wrong. He was happiest in straight lines—see target, don’t question why, hit target, don’t question why—but found that he couldn’t trust them anymore, hadn’t trusted them ever, maybe.

But— _if_ you caught him in a moment of rare clarity as well as honesty—he would have had to admit that he’d never liked taking orders. He liked the idea of relying on good orders, but he’d never seen anyone who wasn’t an idiot in a position to give him orders.

***

There were screeching trains just out of sight in every direction, but they were just far enough away that you could hear the clear and distinct footsteps of every passerby. Clint leaned against the tiled wall of the subway station and waited.

“Second car, moving in your direction,” a voice said, sharp and tinny in his ear. Clint rolled his eyes.

“I _know_ ,” Clint said through gritted teeth, aiming for humor instead of utter, dripping disdain. “Can we skip the inanities so that I can focus on the job at hand?”

“Insubordinate.” The tinny voice didn’t even sound annoyed and it wasn’t an accusation, just a statement of fact. Possibly a threat.

“Is this going on my record, sir?” Clint asked, catching sight of the target. He looked down at his phone, pretended to fiddle with something. When the target passed him, he fell into step close enough behind that he couldn’t possibly be shaken but far enough away that only a pro would spot him.

“As per usual,” the voice in his ear said blandly.

Clint breathed out a quick sigh. He was two strikes in already.

The target was nervous. He kept flexing the fingers in his left hand, the one that wasn’t holding the briefcase. Clint made a mental note. Nervous energy goes a long way towards making missions messy.

They turned into the underpass and Clint made the move. He swept closer to the target and drove a knife through his neck, angled to hit everything vital and to stop him making any noise. Clint was in the wind by the time the emptied body hit the floor.

He was supposed to take the west exit to street level and rendezvous with his handler-of-the-week two blocks to the south. He was supposed to make the route direct but just twisty enough to prevent any possible tail he might have picked up.

Instead, he took the north exit, the one that exited by a building with the kind of fire escape that made Clint itch to climb it like a jungle gym. He did the thing where he sank into himself for a second and everyone around him found their eyes looking elsewhere for interest—and then he leaped. One fire escape lead to another and when they didn’t...well, Clint liked to leap.

His handler was waiting for him at the rendezvous at street level. The man was big and bulky, the kind of man who thought that extra muscle made him the better agent. He was, in short, stupid. And Clint, more than anything, hated taking orders from stupid.

He dropped silently behind the handler.

“All done here,” he said, relishing the way the big man twitched and then he added, “ _sir_.”

“You think you’re hilarious,” the man said, showing his rage all over his face (only an amateur couldn’t keep it out of their _face_ at the very least). “You think you’re _so funny_. But you’ll be on ice for six months for this shit-show.”

And. Well. If he was going on ice _anyway_...

***

Fury slammed the rulebook onto the table in front of Clint, making the tiny room echo.

“I know you know this, Agent Barton,” Fury said in that tone that meant the-only-reason-I’m-not-screaming-is-that-I-have-phenomenal-self-control, “But you must have suffered a head injury as a child that prevents you from entering this into your long-term memory. Since I’ve got the time, we’re going to do this one more time—“

“Look, sir, I know I was out of line—“

“—agents _do not have the right_ to _punch_ their handlers,” Fury steamrolled right over Clint. “And you knew that three strikes gets you six months on ice.”

“—sir, if I may just point out that he was—“

“I’m not sure you understand how a chain of command works, Agent Barton!” Fury shouted, working that crescendo. It was an old routine and Clint had seen the matinee more than a few times.

“I answer to the handler, the handler answers to you, you answer to the Director,” Clint recited. It was skipping a few lines of dialogue but Fury was probably as bored of the routine as he was. Stands to reason.

“And _if_ your handler makes a bad call, what do you do?”

“I wait until post-op to file an official complaint with you. Sir.”

“How do you express your displeasure with your handler if you feel it coming over you?” Fury prompted.

Clint rolled his eyes. “I don’t.”

“Now, see, this makes me believe you _do_ have the capacity for long-term memory after all,” Fury said.

“Is this where I’m sent to apologize to...what was the meathead’s name?” Clint asked, pushing back in his chair so that it balanced on the back two legs. “Agent Gorilla?”

“ _Hale_. Agent Hale.”

“Agent _Hale_. Is that point of the dressing down, sir? Should I put on my contrite face and then resign myself to an oh-so-exciting six months of pushing paper?”

“I’m not going to order you on the former because, frankly, Agent Hale’s feelings are not my primary concern at the moment.” Fury nodded to the glass screen on the wall and a dossier appeared. “As to pushing paper....well, I think we’re going to have use your time a bit more efficiently, if you don’t mind.”

Clint looked at the photograph—he could see the hallway beyond through her face in the glass but somehow her eyes seemed opaque. And her hair—red hair had never been so red before.

“That’s not—is that _the Widow_?” he asked, forgetting to hide his excitement.

“Yes,” Fury said, “only I want to be able to say that sentence in the past tense in three months. Can you do that for me?”

Clint’s chair thudded back to earth.

“I get to be the one who kills the Widow?” he asked. “Gosh.”

***

There was a note on the inside of his quiver. It was written on a post-it note.

_Don’t kill her. Make her an offer._

***

The thing is: anyone who was anyone wouldn’t play cat-and-mouse with this. Anyone who was anyone wouldn’t leave notes like they were in high school wondering whether the quarterback would ask the head cheerleader out for the goddamned prom. And a _Russian_ anyone wouldn’t bother at all.

 _Not_ to kill the Widow was inconceivable. Taking her out would be the centerpiece in any assassin’s crown. She was the stuff of legend. There were courses dedicated to her in his training program half-a-dozen years before. He’d be the footnote at the end of those classes, if he actually did it. They’d finish, on the last day of class, with the signoff, “Taken out by Agent Clint Barton, code name Hawkeye.”

But, then again, anyone who played cat-and-mouse in this Division was....new. Was something different.

***

“I believe you wanted to see me,” Clint said when Philip Coulson (accounts) opened his own front door and dropped his keys in the turtle-shaped dish on the side-table.

Oddly, Philip Coulson didn’t twitch.

“You believe wrong,” he said. “And here I thought my note was incredibly clear.” He flicked the lights on, flooding the tiny, sparse apartment with fluorescent light. It didn’t help.

“Clear as _mud_ ,” Clint said.

“Well, we can go through it slowly and you just stop me when we hit the word that gave you trouble,” Coulson said. “Was it the contraction? That’s just a shortened version of the written and spoken forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by the omission of internal letters—“

“I understand the words just fine,” Clint interrupted. “Let’s talk motivation.”

“Mine, yours, or hers?” Coulson asked. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out two beers.

“Let’s start with yours.”

“Nothing exceptional there.”

“And yet you’re asking me to choke on the mission of a lifetime.”

“Choke?” Coulson popped both bottles open on the side of his counter and handed one to Clint. “Nothing of the sort. I asked you to change the parameters.”

“OK, fine, now let’s get back to _why you did that_ ,” Clint said, taking the beer. It was Belgian and not horrible or cheap. Everything else in the apartment seemed to be both of those things. Interesting.

“I assume you know who I am and what I do for the Division,” Coulson said, sitting on the only other chair, a wobbly wooden one with a spoke hanging loose. It creaked pathetically.

Clint nodded.

“Yes, well, ‘accounts’ doesn’t mean what you think it does.”

Clint raised an eyebrow. “I think it means math.”

“And that’s why you’re wrong. It means—in this place at least—being the department who thinks about the practical side of things. It means being the department that double-checks and fixes and cleans things up.”

“I thought we had a separate department for janitorial work.” Clint couldn’t help it—it was easier to get people to tell him what he needed to know if he made them dislike him quickly.

Coulson seemed to be...well, he looked purposefully blank in a way that almost seemed like it was hiding amusement.

“I think their hands are filled keeping the toilets unclogged. My department cleans up bigger messes.”

“So you’re wandering around, cleaning up mathematical messes, and the idea just pops into your head—“ Clint took a swig from the beer, “—‘Hey, I should just get out my post-it notes, I feel a mess coming on!’”

Coulson waited a beat before responding, his head cocked ever-so-slightly to the side.

“Something like that.”

“Fine. So that’s _your_ motivation. What’s mine?”

“That one’s easy. You’re not going to kill the Black Widow because you’re going to meet her. When you do, you won’t want to kill her anymore.” Coulson leaned back in his creaky chair and took a swig of the beer.

Clint’s jaw tightened automatically. “You’re sure of that, are you,” he said, no questions, “you’re sure of what I will do and you don’t even know me.”

Coulson shrugged. “I play the odds. It’s a math thing.”

“Fine.” Could Coulson not tell how close to violence Clint was? He had to. He had to see—“ _Fine_. Hers. Tell me hers.”

Coulson smiled. “Now _that’s_ the interesting bit...”

***

“Oh, god, not _you_ ,” Clint groaned. He slung the quiver across his back, hoisted the rest onto his shoulder.

“Get used to it,” Agent Hale said humorlessly. The bruise under his right eye was fading quickly. Clint hadn’t hit him _that_ hard.

“I refuse to get used to anything unpleasant,” Clint said, sliding past the apish man before he could get officially sanctioned for sass again.

“We’re going to be in Budapest for three months, Barton,” Hale called after him. “There’ll be no other option.”

But Clint wasn’t paying any attention. He froze for the briefest of seconds with his hand on the side of the chopper. Philip Coulson (accounts) didn’t even look back from the cockpit.

Two options:

A: Tattle. Philip Coulson (accounts) should _not_ be in the cockpit of this helicopter. And he was actively planning to sabotage Clint’s mission. He would be completely justified in blowing the whole op, right here. Right now. And that would get him out of Hale’s company too. Double win.

B: Keep going. Coulson’s presence didn’t mean that Clint would give in to his crazy conspiracy theories of brainwashing and sleeper agents. He was no more likely to choke now than he was when Coulson _wasn’t_ a factor. Probably.

On the other hand, this Division was filled with stupidity and lethargy. If Fury hadn’t been on top, Barton would have been in the wind. He could feel the wind against his face even now. Maybe Coulson was something new. Maybe it would burn him with the Division, maybe not.

And Clint did so like leaping.

***

**Andrássy út, Budapest**   


“This is an iconic boulevard, Mr. Barton,” Natasha Romanoff said. “It dates back to 1872. But it was renamed three times in the 1950’s alone due to the rapid political changes in this country.”

“What side is it on now?” Clint asked. It seemed like the sort of thing a spy should say. Spies can have two conversations in one word; Clint had to fake it.

“This is your way of asking me what side _I_ am on now,” Romanoff said. “Because you do not know.”

Her voice was thick with a Russian accent—laying it on a bit too thick, thank you very much.

Fuck the spy bullshit.

“Someone suggested to me that you might be in the market for a new employer,” Clint said, shrugging. “Sorry, should I have said that less clearly? I get that we’re doing the whole noir-cum-Bond thing, but I’m on a busy schedule and everything.”

The Black Widow looked directly at him for the first time.

“You’ve missed my point,” she said slowly. “This street saw three regimes in one decade. How many do you think I’ve seen?”

“Four? Eight?” Clint asked. “Am I getting warmer? Twenty-two?”

She raised a perfect eyebrow. “Plenty. I’ve seen plenty. I don’t bother with allegiances anymore.”

“Let’s skip the righteous portion of the pitch, then,” Clint said. “Quality of employers? My job gets me good dental.”

“Are you offering me your job?” The way she made it sound, it was like the most exquisite threat he had ever heard. She was talking in straight lines for his sake—she seemed to like that—but she was also making corkscrews out of the very straightness. God, if he could twist like that....

“We could play Rock, Paper, Scissors for it,” he said. “Or checkers.”

“ _Checkers_?”

“Look, I’m sure we can make room if we all budge up a bit,” Clint said. “Tell you what, you get the dental. I won’t even fight you for it.”

“You’re very sure that I’m in the market for a new job,” she said. Her eyes were hidden behind big Audrey Hepburn-looking sunglasses and her nails were painted as red as her hair. She shouldn’t have been able to blend into the background, not with hair like that or that tiger’s stance.

But they were both blending just fine.

Clint moved to stand in front of her. There was a sniper on the roof across the street and Clint was blocking his shot now. This was officially becoming a very bad career move.

“Barton, move to your eight,” Hale’s voice said, still tinny, in his ear. “ _Barton_.”

“Job or no job,” Clint said, straight lines all the way, “I know I don’t like your side. I don’t like the things they do. My side isn’t peaches and kittens either, but we don’t do—we don’t do some of those things. That makes my side—“

She actually laughed.

“Oh, god, are you actually _doing_ the righteous portion?” she asked, wiping one of her eyes. “I thought we agreed to skip that.”

“I know what the Black Widow Program did to yo—“ Clint started to say but stopped when she turned to face him full on. He knew a violent rage when he saw one.

“You _don’t_ know anything, you stupid little child,” she spat.

“No, not, like, _know_ know, of course not,” he agreed, holding his hands up. “Look.” He reached into his ear and pulled out the earpiece. Carefully, precisely, he crushed it between his fingers.

“That was stupid,” she said, but she sounded more impressed that disgusted. Probably.

“Yes,” he agreed, “it really was. And I’m standing exactly between you and our sniper.”

She cocked her head and waited a beat—for a second, he thought of Coulson doing the same gesture, the same expression, back in his crappy apartment.

Then—carefully, precisely—she took a step to her left.

“Now I am standing exactly between you and my sniper,” she said. “Your move. Again.”

Clint glanced over his shoulder. His eyesight was just shy of perfect but even he couldn’t make out exactly where Hale and the hired locals were standing. He could make out the barest of shapes, but he knew for sure that Hale was going to be out for blood.

So that answered the question of whether he was going to burn his career on this mission. How had Coulson been so sure he’d—

“Right. I’ve got a guy we can both go to,” he said. “But I think we’ll need to fight both sides to get out of this square.”

She removed her sunglasses slowly and looked more closely at Clint than he could ever remember having been looked at before. It was the kind of look that seemed to shoot right through your ribcage, somehow, and tear through something vital and small.

_\--“I’m family,” Barney had said, “my blood is your blood, that’s how it works,” but that hadn’t been how it worked after all because Clint had seen, had watched Barney bleed and it hadn’t been his at all--_

“Make me an offer. Right here. Right now,” she said. “Make me the offer you think I won’t refuse.”

“Let’s start small,” Clint said, “We keep a tally. If you owe me a life by the end of it, you trust me. If I owe you, I’ll walk away. If you like. Deal?”

“This is not a game,” she reminded him, but her mouth was quirking up at one of the corners. Not quite a smile, not quite a snarl. God, this _was_ a game.

“ _Deal_?” he asked again.

“I always pay my debts,” she said, sighted over his shoulder, and took a shot. He didn’t wait to hear the bullet hit before he did the same.

1-1. A life for a life.

***

Clint just grazed Hale in the knee but that seemed to take all the fight out of him. Romanoff’s handler—or whatever they would have called it on the other side—got a bullet between the eyes at point-blank range.

She’d pressed the gun—the man’s gun, she’d fought him for it, bitten his arm to get it—to his forehead and she’d said something.

Clint pretended he didn’t hear with such ferocious intentionality that he almost believed his own lie. Most of the time, he wouldn’t need to think about what she’d said when she’d pressed the gun to the man’s forehead.

But he ended the day with 56 lives to her 55. The balance was in his favor and she owed him a debt.

***

Someone—and Clint suspected Natasha Romanoff—had managed to move the battle off of the beautiful and (apparently) historically significant boulevard before the major damage happened. They had, however, completely demolished a tourist-trap bistro around the corner.

Clint plucked the arrow’s shaft from the wreckage. It was the only one that he could see and they probably shouldn’t spend the two-to-three hours it normally took him to find all the wayward arrows after a firefight. One recovery was a good start for a new career. Probably.

Romanoff pressed a button on the side of her left arm-band and half a dozen spent cartridges spilled onto the ground.

“I’m going to drink vodka now,” she said contemplatively. She looked over at Clint. “You will drink with me. Then you will explain to me why you didn’t want to be the agent who brought my head in.”

“I can promise I’ll drink,” Clint said. “But I don’t know the answer to the second part.”

“That’s what the drinking will be for.”

Clint shrugged. “I’ll have to make a quick call first.”

It was all Coulson’s idea anyway. He should have to suffer for his good ideas.

The flames that had been burning quietly must have reached something important because the newsstand on the other side suddenly erupted, the explosion blossoming upwards.

“My people will be here in two minutes,” Romanoff warned, glancing at her watch.

The door to a basement swung inwards. Clint was only slightly surprised to see Coulson come up the stairs from the basement brushing dust off his suit.

“Ours will be here at about the same time,” Coulson said.

“Guess that saves me a phone call,” Clint said. “I hope you’ve got a plan.”

Coulson raised an eyebrow.

***

Coulson lead them to an emptied attic. His plan—and Clint was beginning to get the sneaking suspicion that Coulson’s plans only ever consisted of a step or two in the future and no further—seemed to end with “laying low” in the attic for a week.

“And then?” Romanoff asked. She had a hunting knife out and was delicately cleaning underneath her fingernails with it.

“I’m going to open channels for negotiation with the Division,” Coulson said primly. His eyes kept darting back to her hunting knife.

Romanoff snorted.

“We’re not going to get far without _someone_ overhead,” said Coulson.

Instead of snorting again, as she obviously was inclined to do, Romanoff spared a dubious glance at Clint.

For a second, Clint was struck with the absurdity of his position: in this tiny, freezing attic, there were two spies and an accountant. It was like the opening of a knock-knock joke. And he didn’t know either of them.

“Open your negotiations,” Clint said. “But we’re not going back if they won’t take Romanoff as well.”

Coulson nodded. “I wouldn’t have accepted on any other terms.”


End file.
